“I tend to believe that gender as we’ve set it up in current-day society doesn’t actually exist,” the star tells PEOPLE exclusively. I’ve said before that I’m comfortable with using the pronouns ‘they’ or ‘them’ alongside ‘she’ and ‘her’ just because that’s a conversation that’s important to me.”

“I don’t necessarily always subscribe to female pronouns just because I don’t think that pronouns are necessarily very meaningful,” the star of the upcoming film Everything, Everything says.

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By opening up about their own journey, the star hopes to “show people who follow what I’m doing that you don’t really have to conform to those constructs in order to be valid or be worth something,” says Stenberg. “It’s been such a blessing to watch people who care about what I have to say feel more comfortable in their identities because they see I’m out here doing my thing.”